Especially for SME’s – 48: What is strategy.

13 July 2022

SME 3: How to formulate a strategy of the kind you are talking about? Because we think all of us have a strategy in our mind before we execute and that is the right one!

Mr. Lowe: Yes, many people do not think about any strategy at all for execution and think whatever way they execute is the correct strategy. Look at the grand old congress party in India today! I would recommend teaching and tuning our mind to think in specific seven steps to come to a strategy that works, almost always in getting to our goal. This method, once practiced consistently, becomes a habit and as mind is essentially a slave to our habits, we strategize even without knowing we are strategizing and strategizing effectively before execution becomes our habit.

SME 2: It is too tempting to know this, please hurry!

Mr. Lowe: All these seven steps help us apply our limited resources in a pointed way at a point rather than in a broad or dissipated way I.e., using the energy law p= f/a, a, the area is made into a point whose area is so small, so p is so huge, the pressure is enormous to break any obstacle to getting to the results we want. This happens even if the numerator the force or the energy, representing the resources we have may be small and limited. The whole strategy formulation, as per me, is the process of starting with our broad thinking with too many alternatives or ideas we all are susceptible to and come to one specific idea that works almost certainly. In effect we are training our mind to make a cylinder of steel to a pointed edge of a needle. So in these seven steps, we are training our mind to think in terms of what only, and not what all or how many different things we can think off. In doing so, we have to choose out of possible many, so all these steps are nothing but choosing. We can even call them “choose only” steps.

SME 3: It is fantastic, it will also help me get out of trouble faster. Right now, I am thinking off how many different ways I can get out of trouble.

Mr. Lowe: But that is the starting point, there is nothing wrong to think creatively and find out how many different ways are there. But we should not get stuck in that thinking and getting tense and confused. We should break out of such a rut. The very first step is to choose the correct Supersystem or the receiving system for the role we are in. Even this role will have to be chosen out of so many competing roles to be done by us. So we first consider vital few roles only out of so many roles we have currently in our lives and out of the vital few roles choose only one role to focus on.

Supersystem sucks our resources once we put it in our mind: If you put getting out of trouble as the thing to be achieved passionately, you have done it. Supersystem, as we have seen, decides the direction of application of all your resources, including the most critical one Time. Do you remember the SS to results diagram we talked about?

SME 1: Yes, yes, very clearly. Once we have decided on the SS, everything from our intentions to result is automatic.

Mr. Lowe: Exactly. So we have to put the right SS for the chosen role in our mind. We should not put the wrong SS here, else the result achieved will be automatically wrong. The one wrong SS about which we should be particularly careful is ourselves becoming the SS. When “I” becomes SS1, the person thinks he has to take care of himself and his possessions as others cannot be trusted upon for taking care of him and his possessions. This is the result of a deep-seated insecurity in him.

“I” should never be the Supersystem as e.g., in this case of revival of your unit, you should think that you are reviving this unit NOT for yourself only but for everyone associated with your unit SS2; this means the SS you choose should be your unit but not you. Contd……….